Yvor Winters was born in Chicago on October 17, 1900, the son of a stockbroker. As a very young child he moved west with his family to California and Washington, returning later to Chicago where he spent three years in high school and four quarters at the University of Chicago.

In his last year of high school he became interested in poetry and by age sixteen he subscribed to Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, edited by Harriet Monroe, the Little Review, and Others, all promoting the new Imagist poetry. At the University of Chicago, from 1917 to 1918, he joined the recently formed Poetry Club through which he met Harriet Monroe, Maurice Lesemann, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Glenway Wescott, among others.

A diagnosis of tuberculosis in 1918 cut short his college study, and he went to the drier climate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a three-year convalescence. During his enforced rest there, Winters had ample time for reading and correspondence. He sent poetry to Harriet Monroe for publication and continued to correspond with his Poetry Club associates. He also corresponded with Marianne Moore, then working at the New York Public Library, who sent him literary works that she admired.

By 1921 Winters had recovered sufficiently to leave the sanatorium and paid a brief visit to Chicago where he met Janet Lewis, his future wife, at the lodgings of Elizabeth Madox Roberts. The following year Janet Lewis, herself ill with tuberculosis, entered the same sanatorium in Santa Fe that Winters had just left. Winters returned to New Mexico in 1921 to teach school in the coal camps of Madrid and Cerillos, south of Santa Fe. He also published his first books at this time: The Immobile Wind, 1921; and The Magpie's Shadow, 1922. In 1923 he entered the University of Colorado and received his B.A. and M.A. in Romance Languages from the university in 1925. From 1925 to 1927 he taught French and Spanish at the University of Idaho.

Winters married Janet Lewis on June 22, 1926, in Santa Fe, but she was too weak to accompany him back to Idaho; therefore, they were apart for that first year of marriage. In 1927 they moved together to California where Winters entered Stanford as a graduate student and published The Bare Hills. In 1928 he became a full-time instructor in the English Department and started The Gyroscope Group, a dynamic group of young Stanford students who sought Winters' criticism, ideas and friendship. Winters, Janet Lewis, and Howard Baker edited a mimeographed journal, Gyroscope, in 1928-1929, which ran to four numbers. At the same time, he was Western editor of the Hound and Horn, in which, during its last couple of years, some of Winters' best uncollected critical writing may be found. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1934 and stayed on as a permanent faculty member in the English Department, being appointed to the Albert Guerard Professorship in 1962. During his forty years at Stanford, Winters continued to write, teach, edit, translate, and lecture.

One of America's preeminent critics of poetry, Winters began his career as a poet, doing his important work in literary criticism later in his life. His early poetry was written under the influence of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, among others. An adherent of the balance between reason and emotion in poetry, Winters is highly acclaimed for critical theory which is distinctly individual yet remarkably objective. It is his poetry which provides the strong foundation for his teaching and criticism and which was the most meaningful to him personally.

In 1965 the cancer that eventually led to his death was diagnosed, and the first of two operations was performed. Despite his illness, Winters completed Forms of Discovery in 1966. He died January 25, 1968.

Before he retired in 1966, Winters had taught and influenced many young writers who have since become known and respected in their own right. A partial list includes Steve Berry, Gus Blaisdell, J.V. Cunningham, Catherine Davis, Kenneth Fields, Lee Gerlach, Barbara Gibbs, Albert Guerard, Jr., Charles Gullans, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, Edward Loomis, (James McMichael), N. Scott Momaday, Raymond Oliver, Grosvenor E. Powell, Judith Roscoe, Ann Stanford, Don Stanford, Alan Stephens, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, and Wesley Trimpi.

Yvor Winters' publications include: The Proof, 1930; The Journey, 1931; Before Disaster, 1934; Primitivism and Decadence and Twelve Poets of the Pacific (editor), 1937; Maule's Curse, 1938; Poems (handprinted by his own Gyroscope Press), 1940; The Anatomy of Nonsense and The Giant Weapon, 1943; Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1946; In Defense of Reason and The Brink of Darkness, 1947; Poets of the Pacific, 2nd series (editor), 1949; Collected Poems, 1952; The Function of Criticism, 1957; The Early Poems, 1966; and The Quest for Reality, published in 1969, the year after his death. His publisher, Alan Swallow, became an important and close friend. Winters contributed to almost all the important American literary journals, among the Poetry, Dial, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, the New Mexico Quarterly Review, and Hound and Horn.

Publications about Winters include:

Davis, Dick. Wisdom and Wilderness. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1983. (Incl. Bibliog.)

Isaacs, Elizabeth. An Introduction to the Poetry of Yvor Winters.

Chicago: Swallow Press, 1981. (Incl. Bibliog.)

McKean, Keith F. The Moral Measure of Literature. Denver:

A. Swallow, 1961.

Powell, Grosvenor. Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor Winters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Sexton, Richard J. The Complex of Yvor Winters' Criticism.

New York, Fordham University. Thesis. 1973.

Powell, Grosvenor, 1932-. Yvor Winters, an annotated bibliography, 1919-1982. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983.